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Vote as if Your Life Depended On It
As the presidential race heats up, one of the issues coming to the forefront is health care—or more specifically, the lack of affordable health insurance.
Who doesn't feel the pinch? As premiums rise and benefits are whittled away, we pay more for less if we are lucky enough to have insurance at all. Allow me to get on my soapbox for a minute and share a few thoughts and feelings about the state of health care in our country today.
I've often heart it said that America has the greatest health care system in the world. The P.S. to that statement is, "if you can afford it".
While the American health care system is certainly highly–advanced technologically and capable of miraculous things, it does not do a very good job of providing even basic health care for millions of Americans.
More and more, health care in America is becoming a two–tiered system, one for the haves and one for the have–nots.
At one end of the spectrum, for example, is our elected representatives in Washington D.C. who have voted themselves gold plated health care coverage paid for by us, the taxpayers. At the other extreme are those who have only the emergency room of the county hospital to fall back on when a health crisis arises. Forty three million (and counting) Americans have no health insurance. Every other industrialized nation provides at least basic health insurance to all its citizens. Can this really be the best health care system in the world?
There are a number of reasons why the health care system in our country is in crisis. First, costs are out of control, primarily due to the growth of high–tech interventions and the pharmaceutical industry. We spend much less as a nation on simple preventative health care than we do on heroic measures to prolong a person's life, sometimes against their own wishes.
We have a pharmaceutical industry that spend more on advertising than it does on research. In other countries the government is able to negotiate reasonable fees for prescription drugs. In America the drug companies wrote the recent Medicare legislation that prohibits price controls.
Another factor is the loss of millions of good paying, blue and white collar jobs that used to come with health insurance. Call it outsourcing or globalization—the jobs that used to have benefits are gone and they've been replaced now with "McJobs".
Think about this: More than one million bankruptcies each year are a result of medical expenses. Does this seem like the best medical system in the world to you?
More and more people are coming to see the need for a single–payer plan that will not only control the cost of healthcare but expand coverage to all Americans.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School estimated that $286 billion could be saved on administrative costs alone if the current system was replaced with a single–payer system. They estimate that the money saved would be enough to cover all of those currently uninsured as well as provide a full prescription drug benefit for all Americans.
We already have a single–payer program that covers seniors, called Medicare. How long until we expand that plan to cover the rest of us?
© 2004 Larry Forsberg. All rights reserved.
Articles posted on this Web site are for personal use only and remain the property of Larry Forsberg, L.Ac.
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